Test Pit
Wall Spine
Simon Callery's 'Thames Gateway Project' represents an engagement with the changing landscape of the regeneration zone through the medium of painting - a tradition where we are accustomed to find evidence of our shifting attitudes in relation to landscape. The aim of this work has been to develop new forms for landscape-based painting in response to this new environment.
Simon Callery has worked in collaboration with Oxford Archaeology, who provided on-site access to a number of locations within the Thames Gateway over a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship. Sites of work have included a flood relief scheme at Washlands Basin, Dagenham, the A2 road rerouting at Gravesend, Kent, at Woolwich Teardrop, Woolwich Arsenal and at the London Gateway container port development on the Thames estuary at Shellhaven, Essex. Commercial excavation sites are characterised on one hand by the materiality of the construction site and on the other by a tangible sense of temporality. They are rapidly changing landscapes, where briefly future function and evidence of past human activity fuse.
This exhibition consists of two related groups of paintings; Pit Paintings and Wall Spines. Both groups employ a recasting of the support (stretchers) for painting to a more central role, the use of organic form found in archaeological features and the opening up of the paintings to give access to the interior. In combination these qualities involve the viewer in an encounter that initiates visually but leads, through a structured perceptual route to a physical register. Significantly, the aim of these paintings is to mobilize the viewer, encouraging movement from edge to edge, and to peer inside the open body of the works.
These new works connect with current thinking in archaeology, architecture and the fine arts where an ambition is growing to accommodate, record and communicate lived experience, proposing an alternative to the image-based culture that dominates contemporary life.
SIMON CALLERY: THAMES GATEWAY PROJECT
9 October - 1 November 2009
APT
Harold Wharf
6 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 4SA
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